ECE News Story

EECS undergrads Jonathan Brown, Francine Shammami, and John DeBusscher share a National Instruments sponsored prize of $1,000 for best design project in EECS 413 - Monolithic Amplifier Circuits: Intro to Mixed Signal Design. This course is an introduction to CMOS analog and mixed signal design and includes a major design project. With an enrollment of 40 students this course is popular with both undergrad and graduate students. This course is taught by Michael Flynn.

Thirteen groups presented their design projects in December. The designs fall into 4 categories: Temperature Sensor; Cherry Hooper Amplifier; Preamplifier; and Ethernet line driver. All designs are implemented in a commercial 0.25m CMOS process and include complete layouts. Design was aided by a full suite of industrial-grade CAD tools from Cadence. The class selected the best project.

Brown, Shammami and DeBusscher designed a novel 1W temperature sensor. The output of the device is an oscillation frequency that varies linearly with temperature. Key innovations in this work ensure very low power consumption and independence from power supply voltage. This innovative work could have applications ranging from RFID tagging of food shipments to monitoring temperature in high performance microprocessors. Related Topics:Undergraduate Students